


What Does the Sky Reply?

by Cadhla



Series: A Travelogue for Exiles [3]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-05-09 23:40:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5560342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cadhla/pseuds/Cadhla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of Regeneration, Rose remembers what it is to be a time traveler.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Does the Sky Reply?

Look and remember. Look upon this sky;  
Look deep and deep into the sea-clean air,  
The unconfined, the terminus of prayer.  
Speak now and speak into the hallowed dome.  
What do you hear? What does the sky reply?  
 _The heavens are taken: this is not your home._

\-- Karl Shapiro, "A Travelogue for Exiles."

***

He smiles at her, as brilliantly and innocently as some mad Peter Pan who's just busted out the windows of Bedlam and shimmed down a ladder made of stolen sheets. Rose can barely breathe. Her chest feels like it's three sizes too small, and the headache that was threatening before is going off in starbursts behind her eyes. She needs to not be here. She needs to be somewhere that...somewhere that isn't here, before she starts to scream. Screaming, she's fairly sure, would be viewed as inappropriate right at the moment.

Give her a few seconds and she'll probably stop caring about that. Which is never, in her experience, a good sign.

The madman who's stolen the Doctor's skin is saying something now, pulling faces like a circus clown. Rose forces herself to focus. Maybe he's saying something important. Maybe he's explaining how this can all be fixed, or how she's dreaming, or telling her where the TARDIS liquor cabinets are.

"...was I?" he's asking. That doesn't sound promising. "Oh, that's right! Barcelona."

And he smiles at her again, and she doesn't recognize anything about that smile. Not a single damn thing.

If anyone had asked her afterwards, she wouldn't have been able to tell them how she got out of the control room.

She just went.

*

Some unknown, unknowable time later, Rose looked up and realized that she had absolutely no idea where she was, or how she'd gotten there, or how she was going to get back from wherever "here" happened to be. The knowledge was oddly reassuring. Maybe she was hopelessly lost somewhere in the corridors of the TARDIS, without a clue as to how she'd go about finding herself again, but that meant she wasn't likely to be found, either. She could hide for a while. Live off the half-packet of chips she had shoved into her left pocket from the forever-ago lunch she'd had with Mickey and her mum. Find a way to deal with what she'd just seen happen to her best friend.

If there _was_ a way to deal with it. Rose was starting to believe, reluctantly, that there were things the human mind simply wasn't meant to brush aside, to...to...to _deal_ with. There were things that were just as foreign to her as the idea of ballet was to a goldfish, and something in her dug in its heels and said "sorry, no" when she tried to look them in the eye.

Maybe there was a reason for that. Maybe there are things you can't face if you want to keep on being human. Rose still liked being human, stupid ape as she'd been called; liked the mess and the fuss and the nonsense of it all. So maybe it was for the best that she didn't understand.

Maybe.

The metal floor rattled under her feet, and she realized, with a dim, distant sort of numbness that she half-recognized as the beginning stages of grief, that she was tired. More than tired; she was exhausted, worn out and worn down by everything that had happened. In a single day that spanned twenty thousand years, she'd faced death, come to terms with the destruction of the world, been abandoned by the two men she cared most for in the world, traveled forward and backward through time, done...something...to convince the TARDIS to allow a stupid ape to tell it where to be, seen the universe saved from the horror of the Daleks, and watched the Doctor turn into a stranger right in front of her eyes. She used to be too knackered to stand after pulling a double shift at the store. Was this supposed to be a surprise?

_Maybe,_ said a small, analytical part of her mind--one of the few bits of "Rose" that hadn't quite checked out yet, although it was considering following the rest-- _this is actually shock. Like soldiers get when they come out of the war._

_But I haven't_ been _in a war!_ she wailed back.

_Haven't you?_ the voice replied.

Rose didn't have an answer for that. Her steps slowed, stilled, came to a complete stop as she leaned, panting slightly, against the corridor wall. Panting? Had she been running? She must have been, from the way her calves and lungs and ankles were aching--these weren't good shoes for running in. They hadn't _needed_ to be. She and Jack and the Doctor, they'd been on their way to another grand adventure, not off to run a marathon. Everything that happened after that had happened so fast that there just hadn't been time to say "hey, nipping back to the wardrobe for some more suitable footwear."

She'd never in her life run out of time so often as she did once she'd started traveling through it. No; that wasn't quite true. "All living things are time travelers," the Doctor had told her, once, when the three of them were lying on the top of a mountain, watching a thousand stars falling across a sky with no moon. "You start out at one point in time, you move through a million others, and when you reach the end of your journey, you stop. It's the trip that matters, not the destination."

"I'll drink to that," Jack had said, and they'd all laughed, and then they'd _all_ drunk to that, sweet red wine that didn't come from grapes, exactly, but from something close enough to taste like paradise.

Another thousand stars had sleeted across the sky like rain before Rose had twisted to look at the profile of the man beside her and said, "Doctor?"

He'd grinned, teeth a brief flash of comforting white in the darkness. How she loved that grin! "Yes, Rose?"

"If all living things are time travelers, then what does that make us?"

He'd been quiet for a long while, silent as she and Jack had both turned to wait for his reply. Then he'd grinned again, and pointed upward as the biggest star of them all blazed into view, falling bright and glorious to the waiting world below it. She'd almost missed it when he finally spoke, she'd been so busy being amazed by that star.

"Lucky," he'd said, and that was all.

So maybe she'd been traveling through time forever, maybe her memory was just a travelogue of places that she'd been and people she wasn't anymore. It still seemed she ran out of time a lot more often now that she was beginning to properly understand it. Like there was never long enough to see everything, or do everything, or enjoy everything she wanted to before...

Before the star hit the ground and was gone.

She was so very tired.

Further down the corridor, she could see the outline of a door. Head down, knees protesting every movement, Rose turned and walked toward it, hoping that on the other side, she'd find someplace she could sit, and rest. Just for a few moments. Just long enough to catch her breath.

She didn't want to run out of time, after all.

*

Rose woke up all alone in a small, dark room that smelled like cedar wood and mothballs. It tickled her nose. She grumbled in her half-awareness, scrubbing at her aching eyes with the back of one hand; had she been crying? It felt like she'd been crying. But why would she've been crying, it wasn't like there was a good reason for her to have been...

Oh.

It all came rushing back in on her, like a wave crashing down on the shore. The Doctor sending her away; her final, irrevocable abandonment of Mickey and her mother; the Daleks; Jack and his suicide stand; and then the flame, like a star falling out of the sky (falling out of his _skin_ ) that wiped the Doctor clean and left a stranger standing in his place. Too much, too fast, hitting too hard.

Two days ago, she'd had a home she loved, with two bold, brilliant, insane men who understood her, who cared about the same things she'd come to care for--grabbing hold of every moment like it was a star falling out of the sky, grabbing it and holding tight as you can. Two days ago, she'd been the luckiest woman in, well, the world. Any world. Just pick one, and she was the luckiest there. Now?

Now she was huddled in a dark little room in a big blue box hurtling from God-knows-where to God-knows-when--Barcelona, maybe, where the dogs had no noses, and was she really supposed to care? Because Jack was gone, and the Doctor was gone, and Mickey and her mother wouldn't have her back again, not this time, not after the way she'd left them, and she'd never felt so amazingly alone in all her life. Hadn't known she _could_ feel this alone. She'd always sort of assumed there was an upper limit to the emotion, but there wasn't, it seemed; it just kept going down, down, down forever, down into the dark, where no stars would ever shine again.

_Definitely shock,_ the small, rational part of her mind informed her, and Rose Tyler blacked out again.

*

This time, the lights were on when she woke up, revealing wood-paneled walls covered in oddly prosaic corkboards that were covered, in turn, with photographs. Dozens and hundreds of photographs; so many that Rose couldn't entirely focus on them until she'd blinked several times to make herself understand what she was seeing. They showed a variety of men--eight or so--standing about with a much wider assortment of companions, mostly female, although there were a few men that showed up now and again. There was a hat rack in one corner, strewn with hats and scarves and a single umbrella with a hook-end shaped like a big red question mark.

Rose stood unsteadily, looking back to see that she'd been sitting, and sleeping, on a small futon covered by some of the most astonishingly ugly afghans she'd ever seen. What was it about knitting that killed all illusion of good taste in the person buying the yarn? They'd clearly been abandoned in this dark little room for a reason.

Only the room wasn't dark anymore, and she couldn't for the life of her tell what it was supposed to be _for_. There was no furniture beyond the hat rack and that little folded futon. The walls were uniformly covered by the corkboards, broken only for the door, and for a small, dark window.

Wait--window? "What's a window doing in the middle of the TARDIS?" she asked aloud, and stepped toward it. Here was a mystery. Something to distract her. She needed that right now.

_You can't be distracted forever,_ said that awful, logical little voice.

"Kindly shut up," she replied, and moved closer to the window.

It wasn't a window; it was a screen. A dark, glossy, television-style screen, set into the wall of the TARDIS.

There was a button underneath the screen, also set into the wall.

There was a note on the button. A yellow Post-It note, to be precise, looking like it had been stolen from somebody's office.

Scrawled on the note were two words: "Press Me."

So Rose did.

The screen promptly flickered on, showing a round-faced, blonde-haired woman (well, blond _ish_ ) a few years older than Rose herself, seated on that same futon, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. Her hair was pulled back in an untidy braid looped half over one shoulder, and she was wearing a battered, scarred leather jacket with chain mail patches at the shoulders. She looked...tired. But also friendly enough, in a brisk, no-nonsense sort of a way. She was looking straight at Rose, and smiling, sympathetically.

"Hello," she said, in a calm, cheery tone. She sounded like any one of a million girls that Rose had known; she'd worked with some of them, waited on others, gone to school with even more. Another twenty-first century girl, then. Another exile from the past. "My name's Ace. And if you're watching this vid, the odds are that the Doctor's just recently died. Sorry about that."

*

Staring seemed like the easiest option; definitely the one that came the closest to making sense. So Rose did that. She stared.

The woman on the screen took no notice. She continued to speak, still wearing that same small, slightly sad smile as she said, "Odds are also that he's come back to life, looking like somebody you've never met before. And unless he's changed a lot between you and me, he didn't give you nearly as much warning as you needed. I think he should be required to draw diagrams or something. Maybe make out little disclaimer cards. I dunno. But you're probably really shaken and really unhappy and maybe crying a bit, and that's why the TARDIS let you find this place. She's a good old girl," and she patted the wall beside her, fondly, "she knows what we need. Sometimes better than we know it for ourselves."

Her expression sobered. "I've never met you, and maybe I never will. I've never met anyone who came after me. But I know what you're going through. If you look right over _there_..." she pointed to a spot past and to the left of Rose's head, and Rose turned, automatically. There, tacked to one of the corkboards, was a picture of a dour, scowling little man whose eyes were crinkled around the corners, like there was a smile just waiting to break free of his apparent seriousness. A flat straw boater was shoved down over his gray and brown curls, and his chin was resting on the handle of the question mark-handle umbrella. Rose glanced to the hat rack. The hat was there as well. "...you'll see my Professor. That's what the Doctor looked like when we first met. Not much, is he? But he was mine, and I loved him."

Rose looked back to the screen, sharply, but if there was any subtext there, she couldn't see it. Serene as ever, the woman continued, "I went off to Gallifrey for--oh, this and that, it's not important--and he went and got himself shot in a San Francisco alleyway, came back this tall, scrawy fellow with corkscrew curls and fancier taste in clothes than mine. His picture's in there, too. The one in the green velvet frock coat." Ace waved her hand carelessly. "You can look about all you like. I'm not the first one to put things in here for safe-keeping, but I'm the first to think to leave a video. So I get to say what I like. Look: he's still the Doctor. He's got all the same memories, and all the same...I don't know how to say this. Ideals? Virtues. So maybe he's been scrambled around a bit, and his hands aren't the right shape, and he doesn't react quite the right way, but he's still the Doctor. Right now, he needs you more than ever. This is when he needs us the most, to remind him of who he is. Even though it's hard. Even though we want to kill him for leaving us. We can't run out on him, all right? But we can mourn him. Privately. Here.

"Look around this room, won't you? Every picture is somebody's Doctor. Mine, maybe, or one of the ones before, or one of the ones after...I may be cocky," and she smirked, briefly, "but I'm not daft enough to think he'll be stuck with me forever. All those Doctors, all the same man, dying over and over again to save the world--or maybe just to save us. He hasn't left you, not really. And at the same time, he's never coming back to you. Let go of the man you remember, and hold onto the one you have.

"Time's too short for dwelling on what's been lost. Believe me. I should know." A brief grin creased Ace's features, and she nodded her head to the camera, just like she was saying goodbye to an old and well-loved friend. "Good luck. Have fun. No regrets."

The screen blinked off.

*

Rose was crying again, but somehow, that didn't seem to matter as she turned away from the darkened screen and started making her slow, thoughtful way around the corkboard room, studying the photographs with a careful, almost childlike intensity. Eight men were represented, all total, ranging from a man old enough to be her grandfather to a blond bloke in a cricketing uniform who she could've dated, maybe, if he hadn't looked so amazingly wet behind the ears. At first, they were just the faces of strangers, flanked by women in odd-looking clothes--one girl even wore a bikini made of what looked like rabbit skins, and what was the point of _that_ , if not, well, advertising?--and grinning, or scowling, or just going about their business. But after a while, her eyes adjusted, and she started to see the similarities.

The way a head was tilted. The way a hand was held. The sadness and the wonder behind all those differently colored eyes. Reaching carefully out, she rested her fingertips against a picture of Ace's second Doctor, the one in the frockcoat, who was grinning like a madman behind the feathered twists of his curls.

"Hello, Doctor," she whispered.

And understood.

*

Rose walks back into the control room, and the man--no. The _Doctor_ looks up from where he's standing at the controls. He smiles, hesitantly, and she wonders how she lost track of him for an instant.

"Well?" she says.

He blinks. "Well, what?"

"Barcelona?" she asks.

And he grins.

*

_"Doctor?"_

_"Yes, Rose?"_

_"If all living things are time travelers, then what does that make us?"_

_"Lucky."_

*

And that was all.


End file.
